Picky Picky NeoVibe!

[JJGross]

I've been gigging a GGG NeoVibe that I built for about a year now and it rocks the most rock of all the rock that rocks. Love it.

I've been using it at the start of my chain simple because I don't have 18v on my pedal board and it's the only thing I hadn't mounted on the board with the rest of my gig pedals. I also found it sounds more Gilmore after overdrives and more Trower before so that's where I stuck it - in front. I recently mounted it on the board (with it's own PS) right after my tuner (1st thing after the wireless) to try to speed up setup at gigs a little and found it almost unuseable. It dropped my volume and drive drastically and just sucked all the creamy goodness out of the center of my tone. Icky.

I moved it around all over the place trying to find the right spot for it on the board and there's exactly one place and one place only that it works great - right after the wireless receiver. I use an AKG wireless and run the output of that into the NV and it's all good. Run the wireless into my Arion Stage Tuner, then into the NV and it's stool. It's true bypass so it doesn't affect anything when it's switched out.

Does the NeoVibe have some kind of buffer in it that doesn't like anything buffered in front of it or something? I can use it as-is in front - I'm just curious why this one pedal behaves so dramatically different than any of my other pedals (both home-made and commercial) as far as where it goes. Does the Arion Stage Tuner have a buffer in it & could that be the real criminal in this scene?

Cheers,
- JJ

[Mark Hammer]

The Uni-Vibe and Neovibe have what is essentially a kind of mini-Fuzz-Face as the front end, and are set up with a fairly low input impedance if I understood the schematic correctly. The output involves passive mixing bu that generally doesn't cause problems for the millions of Small Stones and similar sorts of phaser, chorus, and even flanger pedals out there that also use passive mixing.

So, it seems to me that the "problem" may be that the tuner itself needs a buffer that provides the low output impedance that the NV needs to behave well.

Consider directing your query to RG Keen. I'm sure he has a better explanation than my own.